Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Mahmoud al Ahab, who described himself as a Palestinian Syrian, told me he was in the al Nusra Front which he said was an al Qaeda group. He had sworn an oath of allegiance to al Nursa but now felt this was a mistake.

Ahmed al Rabido, a 48-year-old Syrian, said he was a religious leader, a Mufti, in the Free Syrian Army.

"I joined because I wanted to demolish the secular state... I don't believe in this anymore because the country is being ruined," he said.

Bahar al Basah, 35, another Palestinian Syrian, told me he was influenced by the writings of Abu Qatada, the radical cleric currently under house arrest in the UK.

The men only became animated when I showed a little knowledge of Salafist ideology and brought up the works of Islamists such as the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb.

This led to a question about the future of Syria's minorities such as the Christians. Ahmed, Basah, and Hamid Hassan all agreed - Christians could only live there if they either converted, or paid the 'Jizyah' - a special tax levied on non-Muslims in previous centuries in the Middle East. If not said Bahar, they could be killed.

When asked why, the answer was, to them, quite simple - because the Prophet Mohammed said so. I was then invited to become a Muslim.

The conversation verged on the surreal. There we were talking in a quite friendly manner, with the occasional joke, about killing people because they wouldn't pay the Jizyah, which critics regard as effectively obtaining money through menaces.

The interview ended with Ahmed volunteering that eventually Muslims must reclaim Andalucia in Spain for the Islamic Caliphate.

His logic, that it was justified because Spain used to be under Islam, was somewhat undermined when he went on to say that Islam should move on to bring the UK under its control and indeed, eventually, the whole world.